


The Many Pets of Tyrone

by Feneris



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), Birds, Cows, Demon Sheep, Demon Sheep Pretending to Be Normal Sheep, Dogs, Furry Trout, Gen, Giant Mutant Bats, Snakes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-31
Updated: 2017-08-31
Packaged: 2018-12-22 01:13:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11956602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feneris/pseuds/Feneris
Summary: The Flock were sheep only in the most superficial sense. The living embodiment of nightmares and dreams could literally take any form they pleased, and when their master walked the earth, it made sense to change their form to one more suited to their master's current identity. This usually meant common domestic animals of some kind.Of course, being the living embodiment of nightmares and dreams, The Flock often had very little clue how to pretend to be normal animals in the company of a perfectly normal human being.





	The Many Pets of Tyrone

**Author's Note:**

> The product of a late night brainstorming session with ThisCat, whom I owe the usual thanks for helping to develop some of these ideas. More information on the Village of Lanata can be found in her fic "The Wizard of Lanata." and my fic "The Sheep Thieves." Hope you enjoy.

Tyrone Spruce called his animals dogs. Everyone on the block called them dogs too, but only for lack of better alternatives. They looked like dogs, more or less, and they acted like dogs, more or less. 

That was actually part of the problem, Jane thought, it was almost as if they tried too hard to act like dogs. She has grown up with dogs all her life, and she had never once seen a single dog act so stereotypical dog-like as those animals Tyrone owned. At least when they managed to get it right.

It had started with the sight of one of Tyrone’s dogs climbing onto the roof of his house under the light of the full moon. Everyone in the neighborhood had figured out quickly what was coming and braced themselves for the onslaught of barking and howling. 

The eldritch bleating they had gotten instead sounded like it had come from the sheep of hell. It had sent shivers up and down their spines and had almost driven Jane to claw off her own her ears. It only stopped when a second dog scrambled up on the roof, seemed to smack the first dog upside the head with its back paw, before tossing its head up and letting out call that sounded like a garbage disposal trying to process a bowling ball. A third dog had then joined the pair, and the loud screeching whoop that had come out of its mouth sounded like something from the darkest depths of some primordial jungle.

As Jane trudged across Tyrone’s front lawn in her bath-robe, she counted at least twenty dogs up on the roof, with the current contestant giving a scream reminiscent of the world’s largest squeaky toy being run over by a steamroller.

Tyrone answered on the fourth knock. 

“Yeeeeessss?”

“Your dogs,” Jane blurted out. “Make them stop.”

“Make them stop what?” Tyrone replied, a grin on his face that made it clear he knew exactly what was going on.

The sound of dial-up internet echoed through the night. 

“Ah... Just a second.” Tyrone held up a finger and turned towards the roof of his house. “HEY YOU MORONS! DOGS ARE SUPPOSED TO HOWL AT THE MOON!”

You could practically taste the embarrassment in the sudden silence. Then the roof exploded into a cacophony of canine barking and howling. 

“Better?” Tyrone asked.

“Yes,” Jane sighed. You took what you got when it came to Tyrone after all.

\---

The knowledge lost during The Terrors was immense. Everyone knew that to some degree. But Henrik knew better than most just how much magical knowledge had been lost to the collective memory of the world. It was being rediscovered, no doubt about that, but it was a sporadic rediscovery. Real true magical knowledge was often buried in a mire of unwitting superstition and deliberate hoaxes. Teasing out the truth from the bullshit was going to be the work of a thousand lifetimes. 

So when he had heard that folks in a small village in the borderlands could apparently predict the weather by looking at the pattern of sheep grazing on a nearby hill, he immediately filed it away as a local superstition that wasn’t worth the time to investigate.

Unfortunately, his superiors at the Library thought differently. So Henrik was forced to pack his rucksack and travel to the village of Lanata, right in the ass-end of nowhere, to investigate claims that sheep could be used to predict the future. 

Henrick’s first impression of Lanata was grim. It was exactly like the dozen or so other sheep farming villages that dotted the hills and valleys. Still, he managed to make it before it got dark, and was able to rent a bed at the local inn, which to its credit, was not infested with bedbugs and lice. 

By next morning, he already had a plan together. Just walking up to people and asking straight up about their local magic was rarely effective, you had to be subtle and piece together the clues. Thankfully, when it came to reports of weather magic, there was one good way to find stuff out quickly.

“So,” Henrick said, sliding up to the inn counter. “How do you think the weather is going to turn today?”

“Well,” the innkeeper leaned against the counter and glanced out the window. “It’s pretty cloudy right now, but according to the sheep its going to clear up again in the afternoon. Should be pretty bright out by then.”

Henrik’s head followed the innkeepers gaze to look out the window, and he felt his mouth drop open. Spelled out on the hillside in black sheep were giant words, clearly visible from the inn window.

“Today’s Weather: Cloudy and Cool in the Morning, Sunny and Warm in Afternoon, Rain Scheduled for Windsday.”

\---

You could always tell when Tyrone’s cows had passed through anywhere. A normal herd of cows passing through left their mark on an area, they clipped the grass, tore up the ground, and left behind a field of shit. Tyrone’s cows were different however. They left nothing behind. They ate everything. The grass, the bushes, the trees, even things like old bones, abandoned cabins, barbwire fences, and gophers. Plant, animal, stone or metal, they ate it all and left nothing behind, not even shit. 

They were also, everyone learned, stubborn animals. If they didn’t want to move , nothing would make them budge. Cattle rustlers had been dragged for miles after lassoing one of Tyrone’s beasts. Lightning storms and wolf howls didn’t make them so much as flinch. Jensik from up on the hill had once even seen a flash flood wash through the valley, and Tyrone’s cows continue to graze uncaringly, even as the flood waters starting flowing over their heads. 

Tyrone himself was a weird one too. He lived in a small ranch house ten miles away from town, and as far as anyone could figure out, he never actually did any ranching beyond occasionally riding out on his horse (which everyone suspected was actually one of his cows) and driving his cows to a new pasture. Which for him basically meant pointing in the direction he wanted the cows to go, and the cows going there, devouring everything in their wake on the way. Of course, everyone in town privately figured Tyrone was actually the Devil is disguise, and thus could not be expected to do any actual ranching anyway.

There was even a rumor that the Charlesdale Cannonball, the express freight train that passed through the area on its way to the coast, had hit one of Tyrone’s bulls. According to rumor, the engine had been smashed to pieces and the entire train had derailed. The bull had merely been stunned. The cows had then proceeded to devour the wreckage of the train, leaving no evidence behind as to what really happened. While no one would admit to believing the story, it nonetheless seemed all too plausible when one considered Tyrone’s cows. 

After all, if Tyrone was actually the devil, is made sense that his cows were the cows of hell. 

\---

No one knew where Pine-Tree Tyrone came from, but everyone figured he must have been a sailor before he took over the pub. Where else, everyone figured, had he gotten all his birds if not some exotic land he had sailed to. At least, most everyone assumed the winged animals that populated the pub were birds. 

They were certainly exotic, no one in the port had ever seen the likes of them. They were kind of like crows, only bigger, much bigger. Though certainly no one had ever heard of either a crow or a raven with horns, or fangs for that matter.

Kester, the lighthouse keeper, contented that Tyrone’s birds were not birds at all, but rather giant mutant bats that he was trying to pass as birds. The only hole in that theory, most people pointed out, was that no one had ever heard of bats with horns or feathers either, and certainly no one had ever taught a bat to talk. 

And boy, did Tyrone’s birds ever talk.

“Birdy want a cracker?” the little girl asked, holding up a piece of salted biscuit up toward the perch.

“No.” The bird hissed. “Birdy does _not_ want a cracker. Birdy wants **_blood_**.”

\---

“Did that fish have fur?”

“They’re fur bearing fish,” Tyrone Sprucegrove replied instantly. “North Aleutian Fur Trout. Very rare.”

“You shave fish?”

“Naturally. How else do you get the wool off them?”

“There’s a market for fish fur?”

“Of sorts.”

“Right….” The man cast a wary glance over the edge of the dock and down into the dark depths of the pond. 

Five dozen red eyes glared balefully back up at him. 

\---

The Flock drew the line at the slug farm.

Alcor was forced to admit they had a point.

\---

“Mr. Evergreen, when we gave you permission to keep your… pets… in this apartment, it was with the unspoken understanding that they would be… you know… contained.”

“Unspoken understandings don’t hold up in court.” Tyrone Evergreen called from the kitchen. “There is nothing in the tenancy contract that stipulates how pets must be housed. Believe me, I checked.” 

Henrietta Kilsok let out a long sigh and pinched the bridge of her nose. In most respects Tyrone Balsam was a model tenant. He paid his rent on time, didn’t play his music loud, or attract shady people who stopped by his apartment at odd hours of the night.

The only problem was the snakes. They were everywhere.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Tyrone had kept them in glass tanks, like most snake enthusiasts did. But no, instead the walls and floors of his apartment were a moving mass of snakes. Black vipers slithered in and out of the couch cushions around her, a pitch black mamba was draped over the overhead light fixture in long hanging loops, and there was a constrictor as big as her entire torso slithering out from under the sofa, across the floor, and under a nearby chair. It had been doing that for the last half hour without her getting a glimpse of either its head or tail. There was even a cobra with a bioluminescent tongue, doing its best to pretend it was a floor lamp.

“Look, I understand you don’t like keeping your pets locked up. But I need some assurances that one of your snakes isn’t going to slither through the pipes and come out of someone else’s toilet. It’s happened before and I don’t want it too…”

A ear-piercing scream sounded from the floor below. 

“In my defense,” Tyrone replied. “That’s not one of my snakes.”


End file.
